ABSTRACT
Throughout Japan, women are suffering from malnutrition. They are refusing to eat. At the same time, there are women from other parts of Asia working, often forcibly, as slaves in the bars and streets of Japan's massive sex industry. Working so that they can eat and live. The equation is infinitely complex, involving the way in which sexuality and the concept of gender is fashioned in Japanese society. The presence of the Thai or Filipina or Korean woman as temporary worker and sometime immigrant in Japan obliges the Japanese woman to take a look at herself. If one points to the manipulation of the Asian woman in Japan, one is obliged to examine also the sexual harassment and manipulation of the Japanese working woman. The paper presents a jigsaw puzzle involving the following pieces: the family, the adolescent, the Japanese male, the dynamics of women in work and out of work. The signal from the surface of this experience touches the deep floor of the social matrix. It forces us to question the notion of the gender relationship and how society can and should recognise the plurality of woman's experience. As its
members' experiences are increasingly recognised as diverse and multifaceted, society must also be brought to acknowledge the multiplicity and heterogeneity of female expression.
